Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy through Retinal Fundus Images and 3D Convolutional Neural Networks with Limited Number of Samples

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a worldwide problem associated with the human retina. It leads to minor and major blindness and is more prevalent among adults. Automated screening saves time of medical care specialists. In this work, we have used different deep learning (DL) based 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) architectures for binary and multiclass (5 classes) classification of DR. We have considered mild, moderate, no, proliferate, and severe DR categories. We have deployed two artificial data augmentation/enhancement methods: random weak Gaussian blurring and random shift along with their combination to accomplish these tasks in the spatial domain. In the binary classification case, we have found the performance of 3D-CNN architecture trained by deploying combined augmentation methods to be the best, while in the multiclass case, the performance of model trained without augmentation is the best. It is observed that the DL algorithms working with large volumes of data may achieve better performances as compared to the methods working with small volumes of data.